Ink jet printers are sensitive to the presence of debris or dried ink residues on various components. Various procedures have been developed for operation of the printhead which remove such contaminants from these sensitive components. When printheads have reduced orifice sizes, desirable for higher quality color printing, the operations for removing contaminants from sensitive components can leave ink in the space between the charge device and the orifice structure. Failure to remove ink from this space can result in electrical shorting conditions between the leads on the charge device and other leads or components in the printhead. These types of shorting conditions often result in printhead errors and premature printhead failure.
A need exists for a way to facilitate the removal of ink from the space or gap between the charge device and orifice structure even when using orifices of reduced size.
The present embodiments described herein were designed to meet this need.